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There isn't one of you but feels that justice which is the boast of every man of the West. You wanted to avenge the crime of this morning. But the vengeance is the law's. Stand back Stand back!" he said, and drew his revolver, as the leader of the river-drivers stepped forward. "I will kill the first man that tries to lay his hand upon my prisoner. Don't be mad.
"When I was small I used to go to the river-drivers' camps with my brother, and they were always kind to us. They used to sing and play the fiddle, and joke; but I didn't think then that they were rowdy, and I don't now. They were never rough with us." "No one'd ever be rough with you," was the reply. "Oh yes," she said suddenly, and turned her head away.
"Of course, though it ain't the same to you," he added, looking down at her over his shoulder. "You don't care for things so rough, mebbe?" "I love the river," she said quietly. "We're a rowdy lot, we river-drivers. We have to be. It's a rowdy business." "I never noticed that," she replied, gravely smiling.
Then he had watched the black-bearded river-drivers with their pike-poles and their levers loose the key-logs of the bunch, and the tumbling citizens of the woods and streams toss away down the current to the wider waters below. He was only a lad of fourteen, and the girl was only eight, but she Junia was as spry and graceful a being as ever woke the echoes of a forest.
"Grah have white eagles fly, fly on the wind oh, oh, bubble, bubble!" and he sent the filmy globes floating from the pipe that a camp of river-drivers had given the half-breed winters before.
Once when a noted bully came to Viking, and, out of sheer bravado and meanness, insulted Roscoe in the streets, two or three river-drivers came forward to avenge the insult. It was quite needless, for the clergyman had promptly taken the case in his own hands.
The sharp click of the iron hoofs on the road; the strong rush of the river; the sweet smell of the maple and the pungent balsam; the dank rich odour of the cedar swamp; the cry of the loon from the water; the flaming crane in the fishing-boat; the fisherman, spear in hand, staring into the dark waters tinged with sombre red; the voice of a lonely settler keeping time to the ping of the axe as, lengthening out his day to nightly weariness, he felled a tree; river-drivers' camps spotted along the shore; huge cribs or rafts which had swung down the great stream for scores of miles, the immense oars motionless, the little houses on the timbers blinking with light; and from cheerful raftsmen coming the old familiar song of the rivers: "En roulant, ma boule roulant, En roulant ma boule!"
Pierre knew the place, when, of a night in the springtime or early summer, throngs of river-drivers and their bosses sauntered at its doors, or hung over the railing of the wall, as they talked and smoked. The glory of the Bridge House suddenly declined. That was because Finley, the owner, a rich man, came to hate the place his brother's blood stained the barroom floor.
"By Jingo!" The man's face was puzzled. He was about to speak again; but at that moment two river-drivers boon companions, who had been hanging about the door urged him to come to the tavern. This distracted him. He laughed, and said that he was coming, and then again, though with less persistency, questioned Roscoe. . "You don't remember me, I suppose?"
To the north were booms of logs, swilling in the current, waiting for their devourer. Here and there were groups of river-drivers and their foremen, prying twisted heaps of logs from the rocks or the shore into the water.
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